A recipe for healthcare success

As anyone who has been through an acquisition knows, the process of integrating two companies – not only from a business and product perspective, but also a new mix of people and organizational cultures – can be challenging. You must learn to interact with new colleagues in a broader sense, much like making a vinaigrette – shake the ingredients up and see if they emulsify or separate.

In business, though, we may not always get the opportunity to see those socialization points demonstrated clearly along the way.

A few weeks ago at HIMSS18 in Las Vegas, it was exciting to see how well #HylandHealthcare is progressing through our transition. Two powerhouses in the healthcare space merging their product lines makes sense from a business perspective and creates an unbeatable portfolio of solutions for customers.

But for me, as a nurse, it always comes back to the people. Having a strong and cohesive team creates an environment a lot like the kitchen of a skilled cook. No matter how amazing the ingredients – or product lines – you’re presented with, it takes people with the right tools and knowledge to create something really special.

Too many cooks?

Merging everything together in just the right way to fit the needs and tastes of your customers takes a certain level of technique and planning, whether you’re working with food or software. For example, blending great clinical content access solutions from each of our product portfolios – the OnBase Patient Window and NilRead Enterprise Viewer – creates a single solution with greater impact for clinicians and their workflows than each implemented separately.

And having a highly skilled and knowledgeable team of people driving that product integration and vision is what sets it apart in the market. Contrary to too many cooks spoiling a broth, adding experts and proven technology to our team has made the solutions we offer more effective and comprehensive for healthcare organizations, putting important information at people’s fingertips when they need it most.

Our new team coalesced at HIMSS18

Nine-hour days on a tradeshow floor can make you or break you. There were nearly 100 people attending from the Hyland Healthcare team, creating and fostering these new relationships internally and deepening solution knowledge from those product experts. It was incredible to experience.

And thankfully, in our ever-evolving kitchen, we don’t have any Gordon Ramsay-like characters around yelling at everyone.

As the week progressed, the lines between colleagues blurred even more as those blended relationships extended to customer introductions and meetings. Seeing that enthusiasm grow and then extend to the members of our healthcare community was incredibly gratifying for me, having spent a very long time on the other side of the conference table.

Going into HIMSS18, I was hoping we wouldn’t end up like that vinaigrette – shaking everyone up together briefly and then watching them separate back out. I was happy to find we’re more like a really great sandwich, with just the right ratio of peanut butter to jelly, stuck together as the perfect complement to one another.

A strengthened, cohesive team allows us to focus on why we’re all here – to create solutions for the healthcare community that supports them in providing high quality care as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

Julie McDonald, RN, is a focused healthcare professional with a strong clinical, administrative and leadership background. Julie is passionate about utilizing her 25 years of industry knowledge to assist in creating and leveraging technology solutions that will improve the experience of clinicians and their patients as Hyland’s Healthcare Business Consultant. Her past nursing experience has been in both a large, urban university-based medical center as well as a moderate sized community hospital, with a focus on clinical excellence, mentorship, and education of both patients and colleagues. This has provided her with a broad perspective of healthcare organizations and the unique and not so unique challenges they experience.
Julie’s experience in facilitating collaboration among professionals and leading a team collective for a superior quality-of-care experience in a stressful, emotion-driven environment has been invaluable to her role at Hyland. It has helped her to provide a more meaningful discussion about how clinical needs and technical capabilities can be synchronized to provide a superior clinician and patient experience in an environment that is rapidly changing and challenging both clinically and technically.